Conversations

During each of the six breakout sessions throughout the weekend, a large number of conversations will take place. This site will help you organize your plan for the weekend and provide the relevant information for each conversation. After signing in, search through the conversations below and mark the sessions you are interested in to populate your personal schedule on the right (or below if on your mobile phone).

Gender, in all forms, plays a significant role in how education does or doesn’t work for many, both for students and adults. This session will explore our identified and unidentified biases. We will identify issues in education impacted by gender and work to develop plans to address these issues individually, at the school level, and beyond.

While nearly everyone agrees that job-embedded and practitioner-led professional learning is the way to go, systems still seem stuck in "top-down" "rollout" "delivery-driven" models. Help the Boston Public Schools and Boston Teachers Union design a system that really puts the needs of educators and students first.

The term "student centered instruction" has been bandied about quite a bit in the past few years. What does that look like at the High School level? Let's brainstorm ways to adjust the learning experiences in our High School classrooms to meet the needs of students and teacher alike.

STEAM is about more than just adding engineering and technology to our science, math, and art curriculum. Curiosity about the world—answering questions and solving problems—is the essence of learning. Let’s talk about the science of curiosity and share strategies for using makerspaces to reignite curiosity in your students.

Sometimes the learning opportunities we ask teachers to offer to students are not the same ones we offer teachers. We share our journey in using Instructional Rounds to create an opportunity for all learners (principals, teachers, students) to engage in a discovery process, and we invite you to consider the symmetry in your own learning model.

How has our role as educators evolved as more student-centered and personalized learning models emerged? What is the indispensable expertise and value teachers continue to bring to the classrooms and how do we keep these at the forefront of practices? Is higher education and the current model of PD building capacity in these areas?